Disorientation in the digital world (of images): post-internet, post-cinema, post-concept, post-capitalism. All of these terms are indicative of attempts to verbally grasp diffuse transitional states, new constellations and media convergences, as well as the commercial permeation of the online and offline universes. In our media-infused lives, our relationship to the present moment – Harold A. Innis called it “present-mindedness” and Wolfgang Hagen “present-forgetfulness” – seems to be torpedoed. Dates and references are flattened into an ambiguous timeframe that Lumi Tam described in ironic desperation in DIS magazine as “post-recently.” When is that supposed to be? How does contemporary art relate to “post-recent”? Is it a trend from last summer? “What is exactly the chronology of ‘recent’ to ‘post-recent’?” she asks, and already it becomes clear how unsure the attempts are at putting such phenomena in chronological order.
Hackers, media activists and internet theoreticians claim to be disillusioned after the NSA disclosures, while a networked scene of young artists is affirmatively occupied with computer-generated images. For the latter, the internet is mainly for fun. And the digital aesthetics of everyday life are the new pop. But is the label “post-internet art” sufficient as a condition and criterion to distinguish this form of art? Some press spokespeople and curators have weakened the term so that it no longer means that each and every artist who has ever used the internet is included. At the same time, especially in the discourse in London, new approaches are being developed that look beyond internet aesthetics and examine the invisible prerequisites of digital interfaces.2 They include data collection and processing, physical locations such as server and rendering farms, and the associated global working conditions in which smartphones become workplaces.
In parallel to the last Frieze Art Fair, the event Post-Net Aesthetics, organized by Rhizome, took place at the London ICA.3 Several discourses collided there. The main focus was on post-internet art that closely aligns itself in cultural terms with the digital networks and their folkloristic, mundane and modifiable design elements and materials. However, curator and moderator Karen Archey had no idea where the label might lead in the near future. With its participants Josephine Berry Slater and Ben Vickers, the debate got caught up in the middle of a cloud of hashtags and manifestos from the British publication cosmos.
Aside from post-internet and post-capitalism, there was much talk of post-concept. The art historian and Mute editor Josephine Berry Slater cited the philosopher Peter Osborne, whose book on the “post-conceptual conceptualism” of art was recently published.4 By referencing Osborne, however, Berry Slater intended more than anything to deconstruct the prefix “post” – it should instead be called “trans-internet,” because the internet of course still exists. Regarding the “Accelerate Manifesto,”5 for example, Berry Slater raised the objection that in a modernist sense we should speak not of acceleration but of intensification. As the Serpentine Gallery’s new curator for all things digital, Ben Vickers gave priority to objects and the exhibition space over networks, only to then speak mainly in hashtags. The catchword “#stacktivism”6 describes the hidden technological and social infrastructures and obscuring notions like the “Cloud”: cold hardware design and interfaces below the threshold of perception.
When Lev Manovich wrote The Language of New Media (2001), he was interested in the code, the hidden text. In contrast, the discourse on digital culture today produces a great deal of visual affirmation and nebulous writing. Might this phase be described as post-romantic? Or, as many remarked with regard to the Kassel exhibition Speculations on Anonymous Materials, perhaps we can view it as the new Arte Povera? In 2013, the Arte Povera palette of materials might consist of everyday items like display screens, digital images, printer packaging, or liquids that are used to represent the Cloud and other ephemera. An attack on cultural values is missing. No radical renunciation, but instead careful selection, design and preservation. Art must look like a good product.
In a photo series that Maja Cule created on behalf of DIS magazine, she staged laughing women eating salad in her photo studio.7 This was in reference to a meme of that name that an editor of the same magazine launched in 2011 – she collected images of cheerful women from advertisements or the lifestyle columns of women’s magazines. Diet, LOHAS, low-fat, low-carb, lean cuisine. Of which there is plenty. At first glance, Cule’s stock images look virtually indistinguishable from normative agency photographs, and yet her models tell a different story, because their faces are not those of stereotypical models, with long, shiny hair and immaculate make-up. Rather than blank canvases, these models are queer, or “impersonators.” They have crafted their own identities. Essentially, Maja Cule has put into action the sentiment expressed by panel participant and curator Rózsa Farkas at the ICA in the form of an appeal: “Aesthetics still operates in power structures around gender, around race – shine light on those power structures!” Memes are today’s “poor” materials, the contemporary Arte Povera. In 1968, a head of lettuce was not synonymous with healthy eating and fitness in the work of Giovanni Anselmo. Greens and granite were archaic symbols of the conflict between nature and culture.8
However, this Arte Povera comparison only goes so far – while post-internet art certainly makes use of “poor materials,” it is nonetheless addressed at the White Cube or the art market, as can be observed in Simon Denny’s exhibition All You Need is Data: The DLD 2012 Conference Redux. Denny has indeed developed a new form of display here for his particular media archival way of working, yet the sheer quantity of conference panels fails to convey a definite stance. It remains unclear whether the care with which the startup events have been chronologically documented and presented in poster format, laid out like a typical Web 2.0 preset, is to be understood as a critique of entrepreneurs as a species, whose statements amount to nothing more than neoliberal marketing talk.
Perhaps, however, by reintroducing a subjective point of view into the world of digital imagery, this type of art succeeds in resisting an aesthetic that is generic, perfect and thus ostensibly posthuman. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe posited based on fashion photography in the 1990s that “the posthuman is to be found where formerly the humane was to be found: in the appearance of things. What once was a reflection of patience and craftsmanship is today incredibly precise and at the same time incomprehensible, like the difference between a grand piano and an electric keyboard. What is deeply incomprehensible is the lack of mystery, a condition in which the things of today neither conceal nor reveal. The banality of the posthuman is its only mask and also the only one it needs.”9 According to Gilbert-Rolfe, the incomprehensible will replace the mysterious, because hardly anyone understands how a computer actually works.
There were, however, also some examples of the fusion of post-internet art with the market at the Frieze in London. Cory Arcangel, one of the oldest in the circle of the young Net generation, set up a large-format flat screen monitor vertically, on its side. He added the popular Java “lake” applet to a photo that shows P. Diddy on the folding stairs of his private jet. This code ensures that P. Diddy is reflected on the screen in a shimmering digital puddle. Sean John Combs, aka P. Diddy, aka Puff Daddy, likes to reinvent himself. As a “pre-digital native,” Arcangel knows both systems: pop culture and user culture. At the same time, the piece is an ironic comment on the year of the “selfies.” Ever since the internet became a mass medium, pop icons have dwindled in importance. Instead, the internet has spawned new stars, which now included digital objects and anonymous materials. While internet popular culture is distinct, it is not defined by difference, but rather by the mainstream and the lowest common denominator. What rules apply to a viral video? Ones that are not very different from those that govern the stock photos appropriated by Maja Cule.

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor

 

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